Eeens..

No, not boots of leather, but stainless steel sprockets of a White Industries twin sprocket freewheel.

I bought this for use on the roadrat - which might even be finished this weekend.
Of course like any real man, the first thing I did was take it to bits. Here’s what’s inside-

With the top cap removed the single sealed ball race, retaining clip and O ring seal are exposed.

Removing the rear seal exposes the stainless ramps.

The body just pulls out now leaving the shell and catridge bearing.

The stainless hub with o-ring seal and three pawls.
And that’s all there is. It’s a really simple elegant design that looks like it should last well. The only slight niggle, and it’s really slight, is that it would have been nice to have a stainless top cap, rather than an anodized ali one. Unless you have a specialised pin tool that can lock onto the freewheel then the ali one just strikes me as a bit to soft to be turned with just two small pins. I hadn’t got a pin spanner with the right size pins, so used a hammer and punch.. I have left out pictures of what the top cap looks like after I removed it. People who like shiny things would cry :)

 

Ok, so not exactly top secret, as you can buy them from your LBS. It’s a Shimano DH-3D70 dynamo hub. Quality is meant to be equivalent to XT/Ultegra, plus it’s disk brake compatible. Which is nice.

It says on the side that it generates 3W at 6V. I’m assuming that’s AC, but have yet to attach a scope to check. I’m planning to connect it to a Luxeon 3W LED front light, plus battery backup, autocharge and auto switch to battery at slow speeds. I’d also like to add a 5V regulated output to a USB socket. The idea being that devices such as mobile phones and PDAs can be charged on the bike - which could be pretty handy for touring purposes. It’s a bit of a back burner project, so don’t expect anything too soon :)

You can now add location markers to the map by right-clicking where you want the marker. Which is quite handy if you just want to supply a short URL to a location on the map.
It’s been a bit of a nightmare trying to get this to work.
Sometimes you’d right-click and get a marker in the right place and other times you wouldn’t. I went down a lot of cul-de-sacs trying to solve this inconsistent behaviour. Finally I traced it down to a bug in the virtual-eath API code in the GetLeft() function. I’ve bypassed this api call by using additional javascript to get the maps location on the page. This bug’s been logged now, so should be removed in the next version of the MS VE API.
No other changes.

I’ve finally decided that the kaffenback isn’t the frame for me and ordered a roadrat from the lovely Cy at cotic.co.uk

 

The kaffenback is great, but in hindsight I should have bought an XL rather than L, as it’s just a little too cramped for me. Plus it’s an excuse for another bike :) Dunno how I’m going to wait a week for it to turn up though.